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Serendipity 2.0

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. This time we decided to try and find out whether it is possible to engineer serendipity on the web. The post should start with a short (max. 200 words) reflection on what the Internet has meant for serendipity followed by three serendipitous discoveries including a description of how they were discovered. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

There is an ongoing online argument over whether our increasing use of the Internet for information gathering and consumption has decreased our propensity for having serendipitous discoveries (see for example here, here or here). I have worried about this myself: my news consumption has become very focused on (educational) technology and has therefore become very silo-ed. No magazine has this level of specificity, so when I read a magazine I read more things I wasn’t really looking for than when I read my RSS feeds in Google Reader. This is a bit of red herring. Yes, the web creates incredibly focused channels and if all you are interested in is the history of the second world war, then you can make sure you only encounter information about that war; but at the same time the hyperlinked nature of the web as a network actually turns it into a serendipity machine. Who hasn’t stumbled upon wonderful new concepts, knowledge communities or silly memes while just surfing around? In the end it probably is just a matter of personal attitude: an open mind. In that spirit I would like to try and engineer serendipity (without addressing the obvious paradoxical nature of doing that).

Serendipity algorithm 1: Wikipedia
One way of finding serendipity in the Wikipedia is by looking at the categories of a particular article. Because of the many to many relationship between categories and articles these can often be very surprising (try it!). I have decided to take advantage of the many hyperlinks in Wikipedia and do the following:

In these articles find two links that look interesting and promising to you

In each of these four articles pick a link to a concept that you haven’t heard about yet or don’t understand very well

Read these links and see what you learn

Instructional theory was the first link. From there I went to Bloom’s Taxonomy and to Paulo Freire. Bloom’s Taxonomy took me to DIKW, a great article on the “Knowledge Pyramid” explaining the data-to-information-to-knowledge-to-wisdom transformation. I loved the following Frank Zappa quote:

Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love,
Love is not music,
and Music is the BEST.

Paulo Freire took me to Liberation theology which is is a movement in Christian theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of a liberation from unjust economic, political or social conditions. This began as a movement in the Roman Catholic church in Latin America in the 1950s-1960s. The paradigmatic expression of liberation theology came from Gutierrez from his book A Theology of Liberation in his which he coined the phrase “preferential option for the poor” meaning that God is revealed to have a preference for those people who are “insignificant”, “unimportant” and “marginalized”.

The second link was Learning theory (education). That led to Discovery learning and Philosophical anthropology. Discovery learning prompted me to read the The Grauer School. This link didn’t really work out. The Discovery learning article had alluded to the “Learn by Discovery” motto with which the school was founded, but the article about the school has no further information. A dead alley on the serendipity trail! Philosophical anthropology brought me to Hylomorphism which is a concept I hadn’t heard of before (or I had forgotten about: I used to study this stuff). It is a philosophical theory developed by Aristotle analyzing substance into matter and form. “Just as a wax object consists of wax with a certain shape, so a living organism consists of a body with the property of life, which is its soul.”

Conclusion: Wikipedia is excellent for serendipitous discovery.

Serendipity algorithm 2: the Accidental News Explorer (ANE)

The Accidental News Explorer

The tagline of this iPhone application is “Look for something, find something else” and its information page has a quote by Lawrence Block: “One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.” I have decided to do the following:

Conclusion: An app like this could work, but it needs to be a little bit better in its algorithms and sources for finding related news. One thing I noticed about this particular news explorer is its complete US focus, you always seem to go to cities and then to sports or politics.

Serendipity algorithm 3: Twitter
Wikipedia allows you to make fortunate content discoveries, Twitter should allow the same but then in a social dimension. Let’s try and use Twitter to find interesting people. I have decided to do the following:

Search for a the hashtag “#edtech”

Look at the first three people who have used the hashtag and look at their first three @mentions

Choose which of the nine people/organizations is the most to follow

Follow this person and share/favourite a couple of tweets of this person

I decided to follow @ozge who seems to be a very active Twitter user posting mostly links that are relevant to education.

Conclusion: the way I set up this algorithm did not help in getting outside of my standard community of people. I was already following @ShellTerrell for example. I probably should have designed a slightly different experiment, maybe involving lists in some way (and choosing an a-typical list somebody is on). That might have allowed me to really jump communities, which I didn’t do in this case.

There are many other web services that could be used in a similar fashion as the above for serendipitous discovery. Why don’t you try doing it with Delicious, with Facebook, with LinkedIn or with YouTube?

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If you’re really after serendipitous discovery, try the “Random Page” link in Wikpedia. You may have to click it quite a few times before something piques your interest, but then you’re off down the rabbit hole like Alice.

Another interesting site is StumbleUpon.com. This is a collection of links from all over the web. You can select a topic or group of topics, or just ‘stumble’ randomly around the web. There is, of course, a lot of dreck, but now and again you’ll find a real gem.

Thank you for your comment Dwight! I have used StumbleUpon quite a while and had actually forgotten about it. I’ll make sure to try it out again. The random page on Wikipedia is a good suggestion too. My window to Wikipedia is an iPhone app (Wikipanion) and I don’t think it affords the Random page. I just tried it out on the web and thought it was fascinating to see the types of content that are available on Wikipedia…

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[…] title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. In our previous post we tried to argue whether you could engineer serendipity. The conclusion was: no, you cannot […]